Ben Woodfinden: Ottawa, the government town that learned to build 

Nobody thinks of Ottawa as a city that builds things, quite the opposite. It is a government town, known nationally for producing reports rather than buildings, the sort of place a Torontonian pictures as a low grey skyline surrounding a committee room. So it might surprise you to learn that in recent years the City of Ottawa has been leading the way in solving one of the biggest challenges facing cities and Canadian policymakers: namely getting homes built.

Ottawa recorded 9,524 housing starts in 2025, a 38 per cent increase over the year before, according to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. The province went the other way: starts across Ontario fell 13 per cent to 62,561, the worst year since Doug Ford promised 1.5 million homes in the 2022 campaign, and Ontario was one of only three provinces to lose ground in a year when the country as a whole gained. Toronto fell 44 per cent. Which means Ottawa, the second-largest city in Ontario, came within a thousand homes of matching Toronto’s total (10,561) while housing roughly a third as many people.

Part of why Ottawa’s record on this is so encouraging is because of some of the fundamental reforms the city has introduced to make it easier to build and approve housing. But to be clear, last year’s starts came before many of these reforms, so Ottawa was in fact building on an already positive record.

Ottawa’s Housing Acceleration Plan only passed council in October, and a new zoning by-law was not enacted until March. But what Ottawa did already have was an approvals pipeline deep enough to draw on, roughly 70,000 units at some stage of planning or permitting, and a project mix that could still be financed when investor demand for condominiums collapsed and the presale thresholds that pay for a tower became impossible to hit. Council had spent the term saying yes, to more than 60,000 homes, so Ottawa’s builders had something to start when the Toronto condo model seized up. That is a real achievement, and it’s generally quite rare to be able to praise cities for their efforts to get more homes built.

The reforms are the bet on the next cycle, and Mayor Mark Sutcliffe made it from a position of strength. In theory, he could have just left it there, but to his credit he went further and decided to build on this to try and really fix the housing problem that Ottawa, like virtually all our cities, faces.

The Housing Acceleration Plan has 58 action items and 53 per cent of them were finished within six months, with 78 per cent promised by next year. The measures are almost aggressively unglamorous. Development charges deferred to occupancy rather than collected upfront, which matters because a builder otherwise pays interest on a bill against revenue that does not exist yet. Thirteen mandatory studies scrapped outright (wind studies, shadow analyses) and thirteen more narrowed. Community benefit charges cut. It might not sound particularly inspiring, but put these sorts of reforms together and you can fundamentally change the way cities, and builders, can get to work building homes.

The city also, importantly, changed zoning by-laws, which are the most obvious but often difficult problems to address. The zoning by-law, passed unanimously on Jan. 28, replaced a rulebook that had been in place for 18 years. Four units on every serviced residential lot, one more than the province’s own floor under Bill 23. Three storeys nearly everywhere. Parking minimums abolished across the urban and suburban city. This last change did generate resistance and pushback, but the city pushed through, and the laws now in place should make a significant difference. It won’t please every purist and housing policy wonk, but they are substantive changes that, most importantly, actually got passed and became law.

The other significant change is in fees for home building, again an issue that kills or slows homebuilding in virtually all major cities. A single detached home in Ottawa carries $64,634 in development charges this year, the lowest of the 11 Ontario municipalities, and it is not close. Toronto charges $137,846. Markham charges $179,391.

Even Vaughan, which has spent the spring advertising that it has abolished development charges entirely, has done nothing of the sort. In much of Ontario a new house is charged twice, once by the local municipality and once by the regional government above it (Ottawa and Toronto are single-tier cities, so their numbers are the whole bill; Vaughan is not). Vaughan has scrapped only its own half. York Region, the upper tier it belongs to, still collects $92,834 per house — which is more than Ottawa charges in total.

On June 23, Ontario Premier Doug Ford, Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow and the federal government stood together in Toronto to announce that the city would get up to $1.5 billion in public money if it cut its development charges by 40 to 60 per cent through 2029. This was treated as a bold move, and in fairness to Toronto, it is one. But look at what the money buys. Toronto currently charges $137,846 on a single detached home. Knock 40 per cent off and you land at roughly $83,000. Knock off 60 and you are closer to $55,000, and since the province puts the saving at about $83,000 a home, the deeper end is presumably the target. Which means three levels of government are spending $1.5 billion to get Toronto, by 2029, to somewhere around the number Ottawa charges today.

This isn’t really a knock on Toronto, which had to do something and did it. The problem is the incentive. Cities that let their development charges run up fastest are the ones now getting paid to bring them back down, while Ottawa, which kept its low for years and gave up the revenue to do it, is applying to the very same program from less than half the starting point. That is one way to run a housing policy.

There’s still a lot of work to be done. CMHC reckons Ottawa needs 26,338 new homes a year to restore affordability to 2019 levels and puts the city’s supply gap second-worst of any metro in the country. Jason Burggraaf, who runs the Greater Ottawa Home Builders’ Association and has praised the reforms, keeps saying the quiet part anyway, which is that supply “is not driven by approvals alone.” A permit is not a foundation, and a 38 per cent increase on not enough is still not enough.

But the reforms were the right ones, they were done in the right order, they took real political courage to do so, and they were done before anybody was forced to do them, which is the whole point and the reason the capital’s example is worth examining. You can’t fix our housing problems overnight, and there is no single magic button to push that solves what is a complicated and varied regulatory challenge. Ottawa will only find out whether any of it worked around 2028, when the projects conceived under the new by-law finish. Sutcliffe has to face the voters this autumn, long before the evidence arrives, which is the usual reward for governing on a longer horizon than the electoral one. But the mayor, and the city, deserve some real credit on this front and everyone should hope that these reforms succeed. If they do, Ottawa will become a quiet and sensible model for fixing the housing problems that plague us all over the country.

National Post